Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? This bears upon our earlier discussion of whether a horribly vile Lovecraftian creature would satisfy God as the ultimate product of an undirected process of evolution as imagined by Darwin. Impoverished island-dwelling family that we are, we can’t afford normal pest-elimination measures. Instead we have a couple of long, pendulous strips of flypaper stuck to the ceiling of our kitchen to catch specimens of Drosophila melanogaster — fruit flies — that are plentiful where we live this time of year. Lately, our youngest, Saul, age 2, has been walking around the kitchen area pointing up at the strips of flypaper and proclaiming, “Pretty! Pretty!”

David Klinghoffer

David Klinghoffer is an author and senior fellow in the Religious, Liberty & Public Life program at the Discovery Institute. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Jewish Forward. A California native, he currently lives on Mercer Island, Washington, with his wife and five children.